The Free Press is routinely criticized for a bias that we apparently have toward the political left. It has come up in letters to the editor, it has surfaced in a survey we handed out on the Portland campus, and I have even been personally accused of this bias as soon-to-be Executive editor.
In reality, I don’t cotton to a lot of liberal principles. Running Achewood, the comic strip that has been diagnosed as “homophobic, sexist, misogynist and racist” by much of the University’s administration, was and is my idea. I think Achewood’s critics want the Free Press to defer to a set of viewpoints and ideologies that are deemed appropriate by today’s academic and liberal culture. That is a repugnant and irresponsible belief. Political correctness is a form of fascism. It’s the kind of oppression we’re supposed to be stamping out in Iraq. If you want to shut someone up merely because they contradict your beliefs, I think you’re way out of line. I’ve been surprised and a little disappointed at how upset people have gotten over the comic. Things happen every day that are far more upsetting.
I’ve followed the death of Christopher Gelineau, the USM Student who died in Iraq last week, with sadness and moral uncertainty. People are so unhappy with the war that I’ve heard complaints about the constant front-page attention the Portland Press Herald has given Gelineau’s death over the last week. Some of my friends who didn’t know him personally scornfully compare his fate to that of to the scores of Iraqi civillians who have died before him. Why, they say, should someone who chose war as his profession receive any more compassion than the legions of dead foreign civilians? Why should their anonymous, outraged, sand-caked faces drift by, buried deep in the page-counts of our papers? Isn’t it our fault for sending the military there in the first place?
That’s a reasonable and intelligent complaint, though it’s not one that I sympathize with for even a moment. Civillians are dying in Iraq, but not real for us until a classmate, a friend, a husband comes home in a box. It’s irresponsible and cynical to turn away from our dead and wounded, no matter how one feels about the war itself. Chris Gelineau was a member of the USM community, and he’s dead. He deserves at least the attention that others have received over the last year, if not more.
The issue is that people think we’re relying on the military too much in the first place, to the poin that some of us have trouble mourning the loss of a fellow USM guardsman. We started a war on flimsy pretexts and more and more people are dying every day.
I know I’m getting political here, and that’s why I’m going to make it clear that I actually support the war in Iraq. Is that surprising?
In a way, I’m glad we’re staying this time to finish what the first Bush left in 1991; if we’re going to conduct a military operation, we should finish it decicively, without economic sanctions and no-fly zones. My issue lies not in war itself, but with the President’s refusal to say why we went back to Iraq in the first place. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There are no solid links to Al-Quaeda. I suspect, in fact, that we went to Iraq under the na?ve assumption that all arabs harboring anti-American sentiment must logically be in cooperation with one another. I cannot know that for sure. No one in the general public knows anything for sure about why Americans and Iraqis are killing each other. Oil, say the cynics. Maybe, who knows? I think a president whose stated purpose is to “return dignity to the oval office” should have the guts to quit hiding behind 9/11 to push his agendas. Bush’s refusal to be straightforward is far more offensive than any cartoon I have ever read, and that’s where our outrage as a community should be directed.